2025-07-26 03:09:48
It’s the Fourth of July but I don’t feel like celebrating.
I am in Salmon, a small town in Idaho near the border to Montana. The town is framed by two mountain ranges. The climate is semi arid — dry and sunny, barren hills covered in sagebrush. Glorious sunsets. Sometimes smoke from a brushfire hangs over the valley.
3,000 people. The nearest city in every direction is some two hours away. Nothing much to do but enjoy nature and sit with one’s thoughts. No distraction from one’s demons.
It’s the Fourth of July and I don’t feel like celebrating.
I light a stick of incense and watch the smoke curl. After overdosing on Twitter, I feel anxious and depressed about the state of the country. I wonder if it’s smart to be around this chaotic downward slope. I sit with my lack of answers.
When you peer down into the deepest recesses of matter or at the farthest edge of the universe, you see, finally, your own puzzled face looking back at you. — John Horgan, Physicist John Wheeler and the “It from Bit”
When it looks like the world is spinning out of control,
When the ground begins to shift,
When foundations crumble,
When the widening gyre fills with alligators,
When the air aches,
Can we accept ourselves as merely human?
Can we sit with our fear, anger and sorrow?
We can’t fix what is wrong nor heal those who hurt.
Can we accept our limitations and tolerate our exhaustion?
If we feel numb and exhausted, can we resist the urge to distract ourselves?
Can we give ourselves permission to feel the nausea of being stuck on a ride accelerating on fraying rails?
We create the feeling we’re trying to avoid in the way we’re trying to avoid it. — Joe Hudson
I watch the smoke and make a mental note to keep the phone off in the morning.
I did an unreasonable thing and changed the name of the Substack again. What started out as Neckar, my Twitter handle and hometown river, is now simply ‘Frederik journals’. It’s closest to what I am doing: write about my strange journey from finance to writing, down a spiritual rabbit hole, through a dark night of the soul, and back.
I write about what I wrestle with. The struggle to have a healthy relationship with money (neither idol nor demon). The intersection of creativity and healing: mind-body journaling, voice, and movement. Lastly, my surrender experiment, the search for a life filled with love, wonder, and adventure.
I managed to change the domain without breaking all links, but you might have missed the latest piece on making friends with your authentic voice (and having lots of fun with it!).
I am interested in writing that is authentic, in personal truth that touches the soul and leads the mind to the heart. What could be more important in an age of AI-generated content, when what we read, watch, and listen to is turning into a nightmarish soup of soulless sameness?
I have no idea where my journey is going, but this search for the soul still feels deeply important. Sometimes I feel like I get a glimpse out here in the West, away from the vitriol and the madness. But there is no hiding from history.
— Frederik
I didn’t read much in June. I just wanted to be with the land. I’ve been catching up and have been in awe at the writing that is emerging on Substack. I will share a few favorites below. If you’ve found new favorite writers, give them a shoutout and leave a comment!
Be sure to catch the piercing The False Gods of Our Feeds by my friend Rohan Routroy.
An illustration of this is the ever-growing epidemic of doom scrolling, which, in my view, is the nihilistic turn of our intrinsic desire for transcendence. Let us look at these two gestures.
It is the same repetitive motion of flicking the thumbs - a motion that has been around for millennia. But for the first time in our existence, the rosary bead has been replaced by the endless scroll of the feed, which farms our attention to anoint the gods of our era.
While the action might look similar, the desire behind it is fundamentally different...
Tom Morgan had a wonderful conversation about “the importance of attuning to resonance” (to Access Evolutionary Intelligence). “The stickiest idea I've ever encountered,” he writes, “was about sticky ideas themselves. Carl Jung's belief that your future self beneficially directed your evolution by influencing what you were interested in in the present.”
I have a small journal for meaningful dreams next to my bed. I loved the idea of having another journal for a brief moment of “taking dictation from the divine.” I use my morning pages notebook, so far with mixed results. Sometimes I catch the liminal space, other mornings my mind spins up into thinking mode at breakneck pace.
Anyway, the idea is straight out of the creative night shift playbook.
In the morning when you wake-up, while still in this liminal space, reach out and write down everything that you're feeling, hearing, knowing and sensing without editing or interpreting. She describes this as “taking dictation from the divine;” writing with a pure, unfiltered stream of consciousness. Next, observe what insights have been revealed. This helps to map the patterns of this broader intelligence. And then it’s about engaging your rational mind and putting them into action.
Many of history's great geniuses and visionaries did everything they could to maximize this powerful state of expanded awareness.”
I was introduced to an incredible writer, Taylor Foreman. His I Want to Be a Hero was my favorite essay in a long time. I could not stop highlighting.
“Nothing is as important as a likable narrator,” Anne Lamott quoted Ethan Canin. Taylor does this well, first painting the picture of a boy wandering the strange landscape of America. Then he takes a deep dive into making sense of the world. By the end of the piece, my world view feels enriched and I am invested in how his life plays out.
We say things like “dopamine trap” or “doom scrolling” or even “the meaning crisis” when we try to talk about these hyperpredators. These descriptions are like ancient man’s mythical drawings of griffins and dragons. Parts of the whole, glimpsed in flashes, and clumsily portmanteau’d. The only hope to be a hero in this hyperlandscape is to see them in their wholeness, for what they really are.
We are in an ocean of titanic monsters. A little boat, no sail, no rudder. Why? Practically, because someone wants your money and your eyeballs. But what spirit are those men serving? The hyperpredators, who steal your misplaced meaning. They wear your desires like costumes. They live in dark UX patterns designed to addict, in ideologies that demand all your blind allegiance, or in success stories that would leave you spiritually bankrupt. All the alignment I need to be a hero is being consumed and scattered by these spiritual parasites.
I also loved his Why I am Christian again, the story of a spiritual journey plus Ken Wilber’s framework of consciousness.
Returning home with a deeper understanding of my origins was what I was yearning for but didn’t know how to ask for.
Taylor introduced me to Peter Putnam, a forgotten physics genius who “believed consciousness bootstrapped itself by resolving internal contradictions.”
All of our consciousness scaffolds upward like this through induction, with ever-increasing complexity. There are no algorithms. We are always in dialectic between contradictory “mythologies.” Not just during development, but in the fate of our lives, our relationships, and even the frontier of our scientific institutions. You must always pass many small odysseys into chaos, always searching for that mysterious higher synthesis.
“We know things in the act, not in their essence.” – Peter Putnam
Putnam himself was a contradiction. He shrewdly invested his family’s money yet worked as a janitor and lived with his partner in rural Louisiana. When he died, he left $40 million to conservation.
There is a fascinating profile of the woman who sifted through his files: The forgotten janitor who discovered the logic of the mind
“It’s easy to say why someone is wrong,” Putnam said. The hard part is figuring out why they’re right.
And everyone is right. Everyone has some central insight, hard won by the consistency-making mechanism of the brain, built of past experiences, cast as motor predictions, a pattern that repeats, sustains itself in the chaos. Our job is to pan for it like gold, sift it into our own nervous systems, reconcile the resulting contradiction, become something new.”
What else . . .
Paul Kingsnorth with a charming road trip piece and a reflection on what it feels like to be a writer.
“In my house, I have a reputation for wandering around muttering to myself underneath my breath. Usually I’m either engaged in a fictitious argument with a fictitious interlocutor or I’m composing a paragraph about something which I’ll later have to write down.
It’s an unhealthy lifestyle, this; a compulsion, really, disguised as a vocation. The muttering is what happens when concepts and words start to cannibalise your brain, and that in turn is what happens when you live by a compulsion to record everything about your life in words, before it slips away.”
I read Randall Sullivan’s book The Devil's Best Trick, an exploration of the devil in history (and in the author’s firsthand experience as a crime reporter. Does everything boil down to biology/psychology (humans being human) or is there such a thing as ‘evil forces’?
One fascinating motif was that of the deathbed conversion and confession.
Mexico’s most famous brujo (sorcerer/witch) at the time predicted his death to the day. He spent the last ninety days of his life making “confession every day . . . because he was determined to redeem his soul from the pact he had made with the Devil.”
Rod Dreher discussed the book:
That’s the big takeaway of The Devil’s Best Trick: There is no middle ground. There is a spiritual war going on, one that has been happening since the beginning of time, and that you must choose sides. There are a thousand and one reasons why we talk ourselves out of facing the realities of spiritual evil, but it remains there — and you cannot compromise with it.
Also . . .
Neal Stephenson revisits an idea from his sci-fi novel The Diamond Age: self-reliance, ambition, and agency in the age of AI: Emerson, AI, and The Force.
If AI-driven education does nothing more than make students even more reliant on AI, then it’s not education at all. It’s just a vocational education program teaching them how to be of service to AIs.
Isik Tlabar wrote about a question I face again and again: How to Know the Difference Between Your Mind and Your Intuition. Highly recommend both the piece and practicing inner listening.
Bodhi on The Most Powerful (and easiest) Spiritual Practice I've Found
And Wisdom School: The Physics of Prayer: What Quantum Mechanics Suggests About the Power of Intention
“Prayer isn’t merely saying words. It is a state of consciousness—an alignment of mind, heart, and spirit. In many traditions, this state is deepened through ritual: incense, chants, candlelight, posture, sacred texts.
These aren’t just religious relics—they’re technologies for tuning consciousness.“
2025-07-24 02:50:42
Years ago, I noticed a comment under one of my pieces: “Boring.”
I didn’t care. I didn’t even know the person. Seriously. I did not care.
Alright. Maybe I cared a tiny bit. I do, after all, still remember. . .
Paul Graham wrote “there are two senses in which writing can be good: it can sound good, and the ideas can be right. It can have nice, flowing sentences, and it can draw correct conclusions about important things.” I am interested in a third way: writing that is authentic. Writing that leads the mind to the heart by way of personal truth.
What could be more important in an age of AI-generated content, when what we read, watch, and listen to is turning into a nightmarish soup of soulless sameness? What could feel scarier?
It requires that we give up control and show who we are, not who we would like to be. It stirs up a contradictory fear of revelation: a fear of failure and success, of being fully seen and invisible, of rejection, indifference, and applause.
If we let the heart speak, what would it say?
If we let the soul sing, what would that sound like?
How comfortable are we with everything that makes us unique? Could we stand it if someone called it boring? Could we embrace success that looks nothing like we imagined?
Out of fear, we reach for protection: we put on the armor of authority. We hide behind the shield of a proven style. That’s what writer George Saunders did.
Saunders started out writing about his time “in the oil fields in Asia.” He chose the style of a “Hemingwayesque realist,” as he explains in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. His writing was “minimal and strict and efficient.” By nature, he “reflexively turned to humor,” yet his writing felt “lifeless” because he wore a mask.
One day, he wrote a story for himself. Just for fun. His wife picked it up and when he heard her laugh, “a switch got thrown” in his head. He dropped all notions of what stories should sound like. He allowed himself to be himself.
How fortunate we are that Saunders floundered at first. The world did not need another Hemingway. It needed someone who could create books as strange and touching as Lincoln in the Bardot.
I am still learning how to make friends with my voice and write true words. It can feel more like listening than writing, like befriending a voice that has always been there.
“It’s kind of crazy but, in my experience, that’s the whole game,” Saunders writes. “(1) becoming convinced that there is a voice inside you that really, really knows what it likes, and (2) getting better at hearing that voice and acting on its behalf.”
Our true voice has always been there, but we drop it, forget it, even deny it. We walk right by it. But what is worse than being rejected for it? To never try and connect with it. To never feel the resonance of your truth fully.
Alright, you say, but how?
“You can choose what you write but you can’t choose what you make live.” — George Saunders
When we sit down to write, the old stiffness returns. Words appear like a golem made of the voices we admire, infused with our desires to be heard but also to be safe. Ooops. Back to square one.
Let’s look at a few ideas and exercises to find the live current running behind the grey walls of “should” — including a very powerful idea I picked up from the amazing Henrik Karlsson.
Also: contact me if your voice as a writer/creator feels blocked. I will make time for a few people a month to explore this together.
Last year, I did an intense vocal workshop. I realized that writing was just one dimension of my voice, deeply connected to speaking and singing. Ideas from one dimension could help me in the others. The core idea was based on the work of Alfred Wolfsohn, a WW1 veteran who healed his severe shell shock (PTSD) through singing.
2025-07-10 22:38:30
I expected Wyoming, the ‘Cowboy State’, to be a near-mystical experience. Endless open land. Echoes of the Wild West. Instead, I felt distant.
My preparation had been Gretel Ehrlich’s book The Solace of Open Spaces. The writer-turned-rancher didn’t exactly pitch the place. She recounted one brutal winter when a cowboy lit a fire underneath his pickup truck to unfreeze the fluids. That’s a hard no thank you from me. Luckily, I am visiting in June.
It’s an evocative place. Lonely1 and rugged, dry and very windy. I expected flat prairie but was rewarded with hills and canyons. The endless sky seemed to always be doing something interesting. On my first night, I watched as much lightning as in all my years in New York.
“People here still feel pride because they live in such a harsh place,” writes Ehrlich. The locals strike me as both proud and quiet. When I mention that I lived in Manhattan, they simply respond “sorry.”
On the way to Yellowstone, I stop in Cody and attend the rodeo. “Where are my Californians?” the host asks the crowd. Cheers from the stands. “Welcome to America!” he cries. The crow laughs.
It’s funny. Also, ridiculous. What makes Wyoming, population 600,000, so American compared to California, population 39 million? It’s an old idea that refuses to fade. The American West, a dreamscape in which the indigenous are no more than an afterthought. Does this outdated image feel more vivid now that our eyes are glued to screens? I certainly yearned for open space after a decade in a maze of glass and concrete.
But things were more complicated than I, in my ignorance, had expected.
My Subaru joined a herd of fellow steel beasts, a mere pony among the bison-like trucks. We roared westward, cutting through the country in straight lanes. Oh, how I wanted to exit and wander. Turns out there are fences nearly everywhere. Fences and dreaded letters spelling No Trespassing.
This consistent reminder stuck with me.
Move along. Can’t you see? This belongs to me!
Move along, don’t you dare, I’m armed and free.
Historians relegate the “Wild West” to a tidy twenty-year span when rangeland was unfenced and youngsters signed on with the trail herds moving north from Texas, but the West, however disfigured, persists.
Cowboys still drift from outfit to outfit, riding the rough string, calving heifers, making fifty-mile circles during fall roundup; and year around, the sheepherders—what’s left of them—stay out with their sheep. But ranchers who cherish the western life and its values may also pray for oil wells in their calving pasture or a coal lease on prime grassland. — Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces
I get it. We don’t want cattle to stray into traffic. Nobody wants wild camping or hunting on their property. But I can’t shake the feeling that this glorious land has been subdued, that its spirit is tangled up in barbed wire like a deer trying to cross the road.
There is an escape: public land.
2025-06-23 00:14:00
One reason I am on this road trip is to find places that speak to my soul. Blockbuster writer Taylor Sheridan’s mid-life reinvention taught me how much the energy of a place can affect us.
Where does the breath of spirit feel strongest? I’ve found this to be unpredictable. I don’t know until I’m there.
At one point I thought it was about aesthetics. Of course, spirit would be strongest among awe-inspiring natural beauty and in the most glorious places of worship or culture. Now I’m not so sure.
Is this quality inherent in a place (the temple is built where the divine feels strong) or does it arise out of human interaction, does it grow with devotion and diminish in apathy? Can it ever be lost? And what happens when one culture treads over another?
I wrestled with these questions in South Dakota’s Black Hills, where I found spirit strong but challenging. It all started with a moment of righteous indignation.
I am hiking Bear Butte, a small mountain of volcanic rock on the edge of the Black Hills. I was guided here by a local and I am learning about the place as I go.
The Lakota call this place Matȟó Pahá and consider it sacred. I walk among the evidence of their prayer ceremonies: strips of colorful cloth and little pouches of tobacco that adorn the trees. “Please respect these offerings and leave them undisturbed,” asks the State of South Dakota and I decided not to share a picture.
I did not bring an offering. The thought would have never crossed my mind. The mountains I know are not covered in color but garnished with crosses. They don’t seem like places of communion but of achievement. Why climb the mountain? “Because it’s there,” as George Mallory put it before vanishing on Mount Everest.
Halfway up, I hear a lonely voice from the valley below.
Long, stretched-out vowels, a soul reaching for spirit.
The wind picks up.
Then another voice cuts in from the bend ahead of me.
“Yeah, yeah, Devil’s Tower! I’ve done that one, too. Great hike! Yeah! Beautiful views!”
Two groups of hikers must have met. I feel anger boiling up. Their excited chatter seems to spoil a sacred peace.
“Oh yeah, they got the best food, dude! They'll take care of you.”
I feel the urge to take my pocketknife and restore peace through violence. Do these morons not realize this is not an amusement park? Do they not recognize this as a temple of life? No. No, they don’t. They paid for parking, now they get to enjoy the show. And during the break it’s time for soda, pretzels, and a laugh.
I close my eyes. This is just humans being human, wanting to share, to be seen, to connect. I meet them a bit later on the trail. Father and son. A teacher near retirement, a young man about to go to college. I was ready to “teach” them with my dignified silence. Oh, how good it felt to be the righteous one. . . Sorry, I prefer to be quiet in sacred places! But all that goes out the window.
We talk. The dad likes pizza, history, microbreweries. The son is excited to take him to Colorado and “hike a 14er.” I talk about the Black Forest in Germany, the Schwarzwald, named after the dark appearance of its tree trunks just like the Black Hills. They seem like nice people. Just chatty. Well, sometimes so am I.
Then they move on.
The cloths flutter in the wind.
The voice from the valley has long vanished.
The mountain falls silent again.
“This mountain . . . draws people, even those who don’t know much about it. They are often surprised by their strong reaction to it and the emotions it stirs up in them. I tell them, ‘Remember where you’re at–this is one of the best places in the world to come and pray.” — Corey Hairy Shirt of Bear Butte Lodge to spiritual-travel writer Lori Erickson (who unlike me did her homework (and I encouraged her to share her work on Substack :) )
I spent the week on a campground in Sturgis, near the infamous (and illegal) gold rush town of Deadwood. The town’s lifeblood are tourists and the enormous annual Sturgis motorcycle rally (“that week pays the mortgage!”). Main street is lined with bars and stores with biker gear. My cabin is surrounded by enormous RVs, stranded battleships the size of my old Manhattan apartment plus a ‘toy bay’ for motorcycles. By fall, they migrate back to Florida towed by pickup trucks with more horsepower than my European mind can comprehend.
The campground is home to a roaming stoner-prophet. Between beers I hear about whispers and visions, about endless cycles of reincarnation, about the chaos to come.
2025-06-08 23:33:01
By the time you read this I am on my way to Wyoming and South Dakota. I will be answering emails and comments with delays :)
I have only been on the road for a week, but already the trip feels like a teacher. The more present I am, the more hidden treasures I discover.
I am also still stunned by how quickly life can change once we commit.
Until last week, I lived in a small one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan’s East Village. $2,500 a month about to go to $2,700 — too much for me but still not expensive for New York City.
On Thursday morning I moved my remaining belongings into storage. Later that day, I took a plane to Denver and bought my first car. A Subaru Outback with a casual 100,000 miles on the odometer. (Fingers crossed and a shoutout to Carmax for a great experience so far.) Then I headed for the mountains.
Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I think: ‘Oh Lord, you've given us huge forests, infinite fields, and endless horizons, and we, living here, ought really to be giants.’ ― Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
On the Peak to Peak highway, heading from Boulder to Estes Park, I did what a tourist does: pull over to soak in the unexpectedly gorgeous views.
Before I could get the phone out to take a picture, I stopped. I closed my eyes. The air was overwhelming, rich with the scent of pines. Around me nothing but trees and sky. Dead quiet. The ground was covered in pine needles and bits of bark, soft like a blanket. Everything felt warm and inviting. A place to sit and just be.
So, I sat on a tree stump and watched the clouds.
Life in New York had become stimulating but narrow. I was attached to being a ‘writer’ and let my mind fuse with books and screens. Don’t get me wrong, it was important to go deep, both in finance and writing. We have to enter the thicket of nuance to find the patterns that repeat themselves across domains. It takes some work to learn that, in a way, Everything in the world is exactly the same.1
But I was missing the opposing forces creating balance: the open sky, encounters with strangers outside the bubble, unpredictable days . . . wilderness, a dash of chaos.
Frankly, time in the wordless space had made me more sensitive. The city’s energy felt relentless. I felt the density invade my body and build up tension — in the jaw that had to keep quiet (neighbors!), in the chest aching for the deep breath of expanse, in the legs that yearned to walk, walk, walk.
I struggled to stay centered while immersed in the pulsating current of ambition and ecstasy. It was time to take the next step on the soul path and jump into the unknown.
This is the real secret of life - to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. ― Alan Watts
I am learning, again and again, to slow down, to listen.
I am re-discovering how to have meaningful conversations with strangers.
Perhaps it’s the nature of a solitary road trip. I spend time hiking and driving in silence. My social battery is full when I encounter shopkeepers, waiters, landlords, the people who tend to blur into the background if one is preoccupied with the group. I have time. I’m curious. Maybe I am even eager to break the silence with conversation, though I would never admit that!
I find that patient and undivided attention acts like a magnet for stories. Enter someone’s room, literal or metaphorical, with curiosity and warmth and you get the chance to catch glimpses of a stranger’s soul. Having an extra five or ten minutes can turn a transactional conversation into a meaningful encounter.
This can pay surprising dividends. It’s like the world bends in your favor in barely perceptible ways.
2025-05-29 06:58:37
It’s my last day in New York and I’m saying goodbye to a tree.
It’s an American Elm, Ulmus americana, in the park around the corner. I did not know this. I had to look it up. I judged myself a little. I should be more curious! But the truth is that I don’t really care about its name. I just like to hang out with it. I know what it feels like to be near it.
I greet it every morning by pressing my palms against the rough bark.
I rest against my head and back against it.
Things slow down.
I watch the light break through the leaves. For a moment, everything seems to stop. Then the branches move in unison. A silent, secret greeting.
Hello there.
The tree is next to a popular dog run and I am the weirdo leaning against it. But I don’t care what it looks like. I’m just interested in the secrets of the trees.
“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. . . . Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
. . . A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.” — Hermann Hesse
A couple of years ago, I went on a road trip upstate with a girl. When we arrived, she walked up to a tree and hugged it. It was a long, heartfelt hug. A hug that left her smiling. I didn’t show it, but I cringed.
What? We’re literally the ‘tree huggers’ now? Give me a break.
Secretly, I was already making friends with the trees. I had spent a week in an outrageously gorgeous valley in the Dolomite Mountains. There, I found a portal, a moment with nature that changed everything. It appeared as one living and breathing web. As a teacher, too. And I was a part of it.
Initially, I resisted. I felt silly, childish. Then, slowly, I embraced this new way of being. I simply could not resist. On every morning walk, I reached out and let my fingertips run across bark. I got to know all the trees in my neighborhood by touch and texture.
I used to give heady advice. Read this and listen to that. Now my advice sounds trivial.
Before doing anything, do what looks a lot like doing nothing.
Sit outside and listen. Meditate. Pray, if you’re the praying kind (I am now). Slowly let the channel open.
Rest against a tree or simply sit near one. Try to make friends with it. Why not send it some gratitude . . . or some love? What if it could hear your thoughts? Maybe it knows things? Maybe it has advice? The trees and rocks, the land on which we walk and dream, they’ve seen it all.
The forces that we can perceive in this richer reality are fundamentally subtle. My life’s work is to help more people understand that these emotional, energetic, non-logical, non-linear and non-verbal signals often come with a high degree of intelligence. — Tom Morgan
an·thro·po·mor·phism [/ˌanTHrəpəˈmôrˌfizəm/], noun, the attribution of human characteristics or behavior to a god, animal, or object.
There it is. The harsh voice of judgment. Silly boy. Talking to trees. Grow up.
But I no longer care. Between the inner critic and the trees, I know who looks out for me. I know who can teach me how to be.
The tree is deeply rooted. Its branches reach out to receive the light. The trunk connects heaven and earth. That’s how the tree greets the day, the sun, and the wind.
It lives by the rhythm of the seasons. Each spring it sprouts, yet it also lets itself be shaped. It accepts what happens to it and what is in the way — the rocks and the pavement, the droughts, the hail, the gardeners’ saws.
The tree shares: oxygen and perhaps fruit. It offers shelter. It is there to lean against.
When I feel lost, I recall that image, that tree-being: grounded, rooted, and connected. Reaching out, upward. Breathing, receiving light. Listening to the wind, pondering the stars. Sharing what can only be created here, now, by this being, in this way.
That’s how I want to stand: like a channel for life.
Life feels like a paradox: I yearn to stand like a tree, but it is my destiny to walk.
Today is my last day in New York and I will miss my tree,
But not really.
For I know I will find it,
Everywhere and in all trees,
All different,
All perfect.
— Frederik